If we were (but we weren't)
by Candy888
Summary: They do not say I love you, do not endear themselves to each other the way the couple across the restaurant might. Instead she smiles, furtively, secretly, and he looks her straight in the eye, motionless. I love you has never been needed. Sasuke and Sakura. Moments. One-shot.


**Disclaimer: I don't own stuff. Please don't sue me.  
R&R and enjoy! (longer A/N below)**

* * *

 **if we were (but we weren't)**

When Sakura was six, she told her mother she wanted to be a super cool ninja, just like her best friend Ino. Her mother had looked at her in surprise, before enveloping her arms around Sakura's small body and drawing her in, pressed tightly against her side. She hadn't said anything, leaving Sakura confused and squirming in her mother's arms.

(she understands her hesitance now.)

When Sasuke was six, he told his parents he wanted to be an awesome ninja, just like his big brother 'tachi. His parents had laughed, asking him _but what else could you be?_. Upon hearing the news, his brother poked him in the forehead, wryly remarking, _perhaps you might be better than me someday, Sasuke._ And Sasuke merely blinked in confusion, unable to comprehend why that might be.

(he understands his role now.)

(what else could he have been?)

* * *

Some of Sakura's earliest memories are of being told No. _No, Sakura, you can't have another cookie. No, Sakura, you can't stay up later. No, Sakura, you can't play with the boys._

The last one confuses her to no extent; why can't she play tag with the civilian boys down the lane, when she's been friends with them for all four years of her admittedly short life? Her mother had sighed, saying _it's just not right, or proper, for a girl like you to be running 'round with the boys._

Sakura hates this. She doesn't _like_ being told No.

And the girls in her neighbourhood are so much _meaner_ than the boys- they point and laugh at her forehead, calling her freak for her pink hair.

(later, she meets Ino and decides that playing with the boys isn't half as much fun as having a real girl friend)

She is used to denial; perhaps that was why it was so easy to slip into the cover of weakness. No one expected her, the pink-haired civilian with nothing but decent chakra control, to amount to anything. So why should she?

Besides, it was much easier- safer- to lose herself in a petty rivalry with the girl she had once called her best friend, over a boy whom neither ever talked to, if only because everyone else was.

* * *

Some of Sasuke's earliest memories are of expectations and comparisons. He is expected to be a good son. He is expected to be a great ninja. He is expected to be a prodigy.

(he is never as good, great, or prodigious)

When other boys had been waving sticks in the air, playing at ninja, he had swung kunai into tree trunks, aspiring after a predetermined fate. He had never thought of being anything else but a shinobi. Even now, he does not think he could be anything else. He was jealous, painfully at times, of the happiness of others. But not of their lives, overwhelmingly ordinary and ridiculously simple.

This is what makes him blind. It is the same way the all-seeing doujutsu of the Mangekyou Sharingan can render its user robbed of sight. If you could see only one way, driven so far along a single path, how would you know it's what you wanted?

It's like a well-worn path, he supposes, one ramrod straight and stretching endlessly. Running down it and sprinting till your lungs burn out may well bring you to the same place as everyone else; but you'd never know another way out.

He's not sure; metaphors aren't really his strength. Shinobi didn't need metaphors, unless you were Kakashi, whose eccentricities and time-wrought idiosyncrasies could probably be a jounin hazing initiation by now, like _Oh, you've been driven close to suicide by Kakashi too? Welcome to the club, you're officially one of us._ Even Naruto, who seems to make it a point to give speeches each time he fights, draws the line at comparing painful and traumatic experiences with his opponent- _You were orphaned at birth? Well, so was I, and I got a demon sealed in me too. See, shared suffering!_

This is what highlights the irony that Sakura is.

Betrayal and slashed hita-ate aside, he figures he could probably be the poster boy for aspiring ninjas everywhere. Well, Sasuke supposes, if you discount Naruto, who has somehow managed to play the odds so well Sasuke wouldn't be surprised if he died and came back to life.

(he probably has, somewhere down the line. Naruto, not him. As good as Sasuke seems to be at staying alive and decidedly not blind from a cancerous eye jutsu, he doubts that death will give him another free pass, crazy blood lineage and ancestry aside.)

But tragically orphaned young boy, conveniently from an overpowered clan with God like eyes? It's as if the universe was telling him to be a conceited monosyllabic asshole.

And if Sasuke is made to be a shinobi, bred and groomed as an Uchiha with tomoe spinning sharingan, then Sakura is a paradox. Pink haired and green eyed, yet anything but docile. A healer who crushes boulder with a smile.

They make it work, somehow.

They do not deign to define themselves on the names of others. Society cannot force them into a box, cannot assign them roles and labels as it tends to, and that is how they love. In raging pulses channeled in a tranquil stream.

* * *

Sakura fell in love with the idea of Sasuke. She's not quite sure when she really falls in love with him- at some point, she realizes _huh, I am still in love with this idiot._ Maybe it's when she looks up, suddenly, as if hoping to see something (someone) that's not there. When she hears the breath of his name, and can't stop herself from wondering.

When she was younger, she would dream of her future; a house full of kids, a husband to wake up every day beside- she is not so naïve now, to be trapped in a fantasy of peace. War has broken her, like it has everyone she knows.

Love, she supposes, is rather like war- it takes and takes and takes, leaving only glassy shells behind.

But she would not have it any other way. She knows that she could have had her happy ever after, could have walked away from shinobi life and married the boy who lived across the street from her, the baker's son with gentle hands and unmarked skin. Maybe she would have been happier. Perhaps she would not have lost so much, so soon. Yet that was never an option.

(it is enough to have love in a world starved of it.)

* * *

Sasuke falls in love with her the way he left Konoha (what type of irony this implies, he's not quite sure); slowly and quietly, until suddenly he couldn't ignore it anymore.

In that way, leaving is a reprieve for him. From the thoughts that threatened to overshadow his mind.

He was frightened of feeling something more. Not for Sakura, necessarily, but for team seven on a whole. For a blond haired idiot who was at once so much closer than the dead last he was less than a year ago. For a sensei, who against all odds and eccentricities, taught him something. For a girl who was no longer just another burden or obstacle on his path.

He wouldn't bring himself to love her; she didn't deserve that.

(but he would still bring the world to its knees if she asked.)

He knows that he cannot be her happy ever after, not her dashing knight in shining armour. He is more thief than knight; rogue bandit drifting with the winds. But they can be each other's now, and that is more than enough.

It is more than enough that she chooses to love him, when she could have had someone else. Someone who has not hurt her as much as he has. And he is grateful, each time, that she stays with him.

They do not say _I love you_ , do not endear themselves to each other the way the couple across the restaurant might. Instead she smiles, furtively, secretly, and he looks her straight in the eye, motionless. They say _thank you_ in a million ways- a lingering touch, gentle fingers pressed on foreheads, gazes locked for a fraction of eternity- _I love you_ has never been needed.

 _I love you_ was left behind in childhood, in a little girl desperately yelling after a boy who thought he was alone in the world. It's been trampled on and torn apart; left scrubbed raw and bare through years of war. Love is not what Sakura thought it was, but she doesn't need it to be.

* * *

When she confessed to him, late that night, he did not think he would ever love her- not him, someone so incapable of it. She had tried to stop him, but he knows that she cannot come with him.

(he thinks she knows it too)

And Sakura did know that, the same way she knew she couldn't hold down the sky, couldn't reach the moon no matter how far her fingers stretched.

So it was not so much him leaving her; no, not even then had she been so young.

She knows, more than anything, that she had been scared. Scared of being alone, of being left behind as they all left one by one; the moon, the sun and the stars, leaving behind a quivering girl fumbling at a mirage of unity.

He had been a single shadow stretched on a destitute path, like the moon on a night sky: a lonely white crone lost in the dark. And if he is the moon, then Naruto is the sun, forever chasing each other in endless cycles, as she teeters on the tips of her toes, striving to hold on to something.

They are her sky and she walks the Earth, staggering a moment behind.

When she confessed, it was not out of love.

(desperation paints different on each of us)

* * *

In the aftermath of Sasuke's departure, Sakura cries, over and over. Her dreams toss her into that same night like a time jutsu gone awry, and she wakes up with tear tracks stained on her face and sobbing for inexplicable reasons.

At first, she cries for Sasuke, of the boy she's known and lost. Then for Naruto with his futile promises and beaming grin (she feels guilty, still, for not believing in him then). Then for Chouji and Shikamaru and Neji and Kiba, all in the hospital, two of them on the doors of death. She doesn't know them, not all that well, but she regrets all the same. And sometimes, selfish and terrified, she cries for herself, for the choices she's made and all she's been unable to do.

Until, one night, she stops. Like a bolt from the blue, she sits up in her bed, wondering _why am I crying?_ And it feels so long ago that she can't even remember why she started.

It's as if her vision is suddenly clear, rose-tinted lens of the world shattered into pieces. Clutching her covers with shuddering breaths, she lets her tears dry and desperate gulps of air become tiny hiccups that vanish as she flops back down, exhausted.

(the next day, she gathers her anger and fear to knock on Tsunade's door. her tears do not dictate her life.)

(it was _hard,_ realizing how painfully behind she was - sometimes she wanted, more than anything, to _stop._ she continued anyway. it might not ever be easy- but no one said it had to.)

An aside, though: if Sakura was faced with the same dream now, after everything, she would probably punched Sasuke in the face, chakra enhanced and no holds barred. As much as she loves him- no, almost because she loves him, because she cares, because she stayed- some feelings are hard forgotten.

* * *

In the aftermath of Itachi's death, Sasuke dreams; a long and twisted fit rather than the short and fleeting nightmares he is accustomed to.

In it, he sees Itachi's face, hovering above him with fingers reaching for his forehead only to fall short, dipping into a pool of blood instead. Then Itachi's face morphs into Naruto, who is laughing at him, painting bloody leaf signs on Sasuke's forehead. The crimson trickles into his eye and he stands motionless, unable to even blink.

Dream-Naruto is slowly joined by a bunch of his clones, all slipping into existence like mirages and each wearing the same foolhardy grin. They poke at Sasuke's forehead, and laugh and laugh and laugh while he stares, silent and paralyzed.

The sky is a rich scarlet, dripping onto the ground and around him before melting away to reveal the old Uchiha compound. His old house- the kitchen, to be exact- with a family photo resting on the nearby table. The Narutos are replaced by his mother who softly wipes his face, asking him if he's okay.

Her face turns into something harder, angrier- like sand running to glass- at his silence, and she breaks down before him, both yelling and sobbing at once. He tries turning away, closing his eyes, anything, but his limbs remain locked, as if plunged in molasses. She blurs between demon and human, empty eye sockets and cracked lips rolled in one. _How could you,_ she screeches, raking her nails down the cheek she once stroked, _how could you how could you howcouldyouhowcouldyouhowcouldyou-_

She dissolves into wails, and the scene warps from kitchen into cool air and trees.

A single bench sits to his left. The moon lies eerily in the night sky. Clouds drift above, faint wisps of white like feathers. A girl stands in his path, lips moving soundlessly.

Her eyes glimmer with unshed tears as she shakes her head, taller and distant and closed off. An older Sakura is before him, bloodied and resigned.

 _I have loved three things,_ she whispers, _this place, you, and a dream._

She pauses, turning her head up at the moon. He does not see a single tear fall down her face. Instead, her visage smiles, faint and bitter before she speaks once more, vanishing as her words echo around him.

 _But who says they were not the same?_

He wakes up in a rush, hand automatically grasping Kusanagi. Gasping, he unknowingly activates his sharingan, letting the world bleed sharply into focus before slumping down once more.

When he wakes again, he does not remember.

* * *

Where the boys learn to fight it out, brute force and screaming in displays of dominance, Sakura learns, from Ino, to be subtle. _Kill 'em with kindness,_ she says, hands on her hips and all 10 year old sass, _Except not really 'cause no one's kind in this world._ And Sakura listens to each word, learns to smile and nod her head quietly, to watch and listen and wait, before striking at an open back.

It's not betrayal, she thinks, if you couldn't be bothered to see it coming.

(she also thinks that a world with no one kind is a very sad place to be)

(she's right, although she wishes otherwise)

Years later, she remembers this. It is what lets her ignore the mutters that used to snake their way into her ears, when she was alone and fumbling, tripping over footprints traced before her.

They call her a healer, but they deride her skills elsewhere. Weak, they hurl at her, small, coward, the words sliding off the backs of their tongues as easy as asking about the weather.

She takes their words and folds them into her scars.

One across her shoulder, just under her vest and pale in its obscurity, from a single sword. He was so young, and she had not seen the enemy in that moment, only a scared boy with frightened eyes- she'd hesitated, a momentary chink in her defences. But they were all too young for war. Forced to grow up beyond their years.

(She remembers Ino, a wisp of her former fire, huddled under a tree at her father's funeral. She remembers seeing her shake her head, and harden her eyes once more- war does not forgive the broken.)

One down her left thigh, remnants of an old burn. The girl not quite as young (still a girl, though, a child), fingers nimbly forming seals for flames. Tall, ugly ones that reared their heads at the surrounding forest, scorching the earth and stealing everything in between.

(She remembers standing paralyzed in the face of overwhelming heat. Being so drained, so tired, so resigned, she had almost stepped into the embrace of ash and orange tongues of flame. Even now, she has never told anyone how close she had gotten to giving up. Then the lick of pain had registered, a brief sting that slapped her upside her head and reminded her- of the rows of bodies that lay in the hospital, and the bigger ones heaped atop each other in the fields they used when they ran out of space. She will not die from herself.)

One right below her lowest rib, a dagger wound plunged into her and carried for a fortnight before she was able to stop. She doesn't know who had hit her- only that she had to run, run, get out, get away, escape, kill- a blur of commands and motions sharpened by adrenaline.

(She remembers not stopping, not once, even as those around her cried out and fell. Maybe she is a healer, but she is also a soldier; unrepentant and unflinching even to death.)

The countless ones buried beneath her skin. Nail marks in the palms of her hands as she held back tears watching a patient die before her. Bruises across the rims of her knuckles as she forced resentment into rage, loneliness into fortitude.

They have called her weak, laughed as she struggles to step out of the shadows that surround her. Perhaps they were right. Perhaps she has cried herself to sleep, the tear tracks gone by the time she woke up. Perhaps she has wondered if she is anything more than a little civilian girl unwilling to grow up.

But that is not their story to tell- it is hers. Those are her scars that mar her skin, the marks of a girl eager to prove herself to those unwilling to see beyond the pink hair.

* * *

Sasuke had entertained the notion of his own family, once. Before he was nine years old. Now, the word makes him draw in a sharp intake of a hiss, as if six letters can burn him. Where others learned love, he knew only hate, in scorching flames and shrieking steel.

There is no camaraderie in his new team. They are his pawns, weapons, tools; nothing more or less. He will not have hesitation stray his route. The allowances he might have made once, he no longer has the luxury to.

Sasuke doesn't remember his first kill. There had been 20 different Sound-nin preying on him, a "test" by Orochimaru to gauge his skills. At least one of them was burned. He thinks another two or three were sliced in half. Maybe some slumped on the ground with their throats slit. Some survived- probably.

All he knows is that at the end of it, after the black that threatened overshadow his vision, the fiery drive to push further and further on, the faint hiss in his ear that cooed promises of destruction (he's not too sure whose voice he heard in his head, Orochimaru's silver tongue, or his own demons), when he was bathed in blood and bodies littered the ground- he had a faint thought, a passing view as if viewing his body from someone else, of _I just killed someone._

He sleeps that night as he always had.

(he didn't like it, per se, but their faces never haunt him.)

* * *

When Sakura kills for the first time, she knows she will remember them. Blonde hair ( _like Ino's_ , her mind whispered) cropped close to the head. Blue eyes ( _Naruto_ , she thought) feral and unforgiving. A water user whose jutsus nearly drowned Sakura, if not for her chakra control.

She remembers, but does not dwell. Late at night as they curl up on her couch, their feet intertwined, she whispers it like a dirty secret to Ino. _I killed someone,_ she says, and Ino only nods her head, tugging Sakura a little closer. They don't say anything, but Sakura knows she understands.

She has danced with death too often to be fazed.

The one she chooses to count happened over a year before. This time, she can recall much more than a face, more than the body of the chunin she was operating on. He had a name, she thought, a life and friends and infinite possibilities apart from the bloodstained mission scroll. Death, she realizes as she hunches over the bathroom sink, wrists trembling and throat aching from the acrid burn of vomit, does not discriminate.

There's a certain irony, she'll think later; that someone who heals to save lives acquiesces to death more than anyone else.

(if the cries of those she could not save haunt her, she no longer shows it)

* * *

Sakura fights, once, with Temari of all people, over Sasuke. _He's not coming back, you know,_ the older kunoichi remarks, almost offhandedly if not for her crossed arms and closed expression; tense, muscles coiled and bunched underneath her clothes. She leans back, head brushing the wall behind her. The sun is coming in from the left, setting way out in the east behind the numerous golden buildings that illuminate the landscape beside them.

 _I know,_ Sakura responds, cold and brittle, eyes flashing in the evening light.

 _Do you really?_ Temari asks, and Sakura wants to snap, wants to retort, wants to angrily yell _How can you understand? You don't know him! None of you do!_

But she doesn't either. She doesn't know Sasuke; she can't even begin to understand him.

Instead, she forces out, _I know enough,_ hating herself for her hesitancy.

 _I don't think you do,_ Temari begins, and it's nonchalant, really- except it's not, and Sakura is tired, tired of being told she's wrong, tired of being told to step back, tired of being underestimated over and over again.

Being underestimated; It's both her greatest weakness and strength. She is strong because they do not think that she can be, because they do not think she will, because they do not see her coming. But she is weak, because they look at her and see someone who needs to be protected and shoved aside, and do not let her become anything else.

But it makes Sakura wonder: if she was the one who underestimated herself the most. Whether her own demons, the ones that whispered excuses in her ears and carefully stroked her fragile ego, are the ones that set her this way. Whether Temari underestimates her strength, or whether Sakura underestimates her weakness.

 _He's changed, Sakura, more than I think you know, and I can't expect you to be able to face that. You can't save him any more,_ Temari is saying, and something in Sakura just burns at those words.

 _You think I don't know that?_ She asks sharply, softly, like a scalpel digging into flesh.

 _I think you don't want to,_ Temari states, and Sakura remembers who's standing in front of her. That Temari has cut her way through the world of politics from the moment she was born, the oldest child in a backdrop of cutthroat killers. That she held her own, watching out for her siblings the only way she knew, in a family of a father who didn't love her, and brothers who didn't know how. That she watched her youngest brother wrestle his monster, and finally be free of it.

 _I can do it, you know. I can kill him,_ is all Sakura says.

 _You can't,_ Temari replies, _the way he was, he would stab you straight through before you even had the resolve to draw your blade. You still hesitate, Sakura; he won't._

 _What do you know?_ She scoffs, as if dismissing her, and it's downhill from there. Temari's words resound in Sakura's head, bouncing among countless others, each more belittling than the last. Sakura straightens, balling her fists, feeling small and pathetic and aching to crush that feeling, to silence the voices.

 _I saw him,_ Temari presses, _he's a monster._ But her voice is fading as she shifts her stance, feet tense as she eyes Sakura's clenched fists.

 _And you'd know all about those, wouldn't you?_ Sakura fires back, not really hearing herself; only the voices, raucous and insistent, drowning out anything else. _Didn't you live with one for 12 years? What makes this so different? Why can't I stop him?_

Temari flinches, as if struck. Narrowing her eyes, she moves-

It's nothing like a spar; all sense of choreography and fluidity are thrown out the window. It's quick and rash and painful, neither girl wanting to take more than what the war already has, but both unwilling to compromise their position.

In the end they stand apart, raggedly panting. Temari grits out, _I'm warning you- I don't want to watch someone else close to me fall to a monster I could have kept them from._

 _Just...stop,_ Sakura responds, pooling green chakra over a scratch in her arm, _I've had enough._

She refuses to look Temari in the eye, and the other kunoichi departs, resigned and weary.

(they forgive each other after, but that's besides the point. the point is, for an instant, Sakura found herself as lost as Sasuke was, drowned out in single-minded intensity)

(later, Sakura will confront Sasuke. she will lock eyes with him, and tell him a lie. she will find herself staring hesitation in its face once more, unable to properly face it before the intervention of others. she will wonder- why she can't, won't, didn't- but those are just excuses)

* * *

When Sasuke attempts to kill Sakura, he doesn't lie. Yes, he meant to kill her. Yes, he knocked her out- twice. Yes, he has brushed her aside, too many times before.

It's his biggest weakness- a single-minded intensity that threatens to engulf all else.

* * *

Sakura is a lot of things, Sasuke thinks, but she has never been weak. Immature, oversensitive, painfully ordinary (pink hair aside), selfish, but never weak.

Weakness is not admitting that you're scared; it's refusing to step forward in spite of it. And she has, every time.

That, he thinks is Sakura's strength. Not that she stands, tall and infallible, but that she falls and climbs back up; lets herself crumble, then holds herself up, cracks still showing. Where she is strong, he is weak. He cannot walk through the village, not once, without thinking of his sins. And yet she is able to return to the hospital each day, in spite of the deaths that have stained her fingers there in the years prior.

Although people still talked. He knew that. Sometimes on a mission they would taunt him, mocking of his _poor wife at home, waiting for someone who's never going to return._

He doesn't deign a response; Sakura has never needed someone to speak for her. But if he slashes a little harder, runs just a bit faster home- well, no one has to know.

* * *

He tells her once, _come with me._

It's late at night, after his party- well, his belated birthday 'celebration', organized by Naruto to coincide with his arrival into the village- and the two of them sit atop Hokage mountain together, Sakura gently kicking her heels into the tip of Kakashi's sculpted hair and Sasuke leaned against its stiff edge.

The sky is awash in the early blues of mornings that come just before dawn, with a million stars twinkling overhead in constellations and the moon an easy constant, waxing and waning in its monotony. Tonight it is a misty pearl, benign and simple.

In the distance, they can hear Naruto's drunken cajoles as he leans against Hinata, gesticulating wildly at the rock. Probably something about getting up there soon; Kakashi had been dropping hints about early retirement all night before he shunshin'd away, visible eye crinkling into its usual crescent moon.

Sakura asks him, _When are you leaving,_ quietly and carefully, as if scared of breaking the calm that surrounds them.

 _Come with me,_ he responds; softly, letting the words hang in the air.

She startles, legs paused in their swinging for a moment before swaying again.

 _Getting a bit lonely on the road of life?_ She teases.

 _Maybe,_ Sasuke says, and they lapse into silence once more.

Then Sakura leans back, almost imperceptibly, slowly brushing her shoulder against his, and that's that, really.

There aren't any fireworks, no romantic kiss scenes- Sasuke doesn't release a breath he didn't know he'd been holding, doesn't tuck her hair behind her ear, doesn't lean down and kiss her cheek; they've grown past that, now.

(he does kiss her, later; slow and languid and tasting of promise)

* * *

 _I won't ask you to come back with me,_ she tells him one night on their journey, the flickering firelight glancing off her eyes, _When I go back to Konoha to raise our child._

 _You can't cage the wind_ , she supposes (knows). She can't tie Sasuke down to somewhere with too many painful memories.

 _Thank you,_ he states, plainly and solidly, locking his gaze with her own.

 _Thank you._ He has always meant for those words to reach her in the things he can't say. Thank you for being beside me, he wants to say, for falling in love not just with me, but all my scars and faults as well. For accepting my unspoken apologies.

See, the thing is, he does love her. And that's their own thing unto itself. Problems do not make themselves apparent to others, not when their worst demons are within.

They gently rest against the trunk of a neighbouring tree. Eventually, Sakura dozes off, chest rising and falling with short puffs of air. Sasuke traces her cheekbones, as if canvassing the map of a landscape half forgotten, with his other hand absentmindedly curled in hers, their fingers laced together.

* * *

Love is not an entirely foreign feeling, Sasuke muses.

He remembers writing an essay in the academy on what becoming a ninja meant to him, in one word, and why. Not that he can really recall his writing now, but he was pretty sure that he chose something along the lines of achieving vengeance and killing a certain man and all that good revenge plot stuff.

In retrospect, he's surprised no one called him out on it. A ten-year old kid as thirsty for evil as Naruto is for ramen? That would be, as it did turn out, a recipe for disaster.

(he sometimes questions Konoha's education system; were they just really bad at foreseeing who wouldn't pass a minimum sanity requirement (see exhibit A: Orochimaru) or unwilling to deal with the therapy required for said people- he doesn't blame them for that; not everyone has a built in therapy system like Naruto.)

(that, and the fact that _Orochimaru_ had to be the one to tell him what repopulating his clan would really entail. there are some things you never really recover from, he believes (see exhibit B: older brother killing your parents in front of you and setting you on a never ending quest of revenge), and a crazy snake paedophile teaching you sex-ed is one of them.)

But he digresses.

At any rate, he thinks again of the same question. What does it mean to be a ninja? To uphold your own code of values, to establish your own nindo? Or to adhere to the system, abide by the rules? Or, as Kakashi would ever so subtly put it, _Looking underneath the underneath._

Now, if he had one word, he would choose ephemeral. He knows now, more than almost anyone, how quickly he could die (multiple life and death battles against arguably the strongest, or second strongest depending on the day of the week, ninja tend to do that to you).

But it's what you lived for; not for the long, hard-fought battles, or for the glory in winning. It was for the fleeting snatches of happiness, in those simple moments of understanding with someone else.

So he won't have eternity; he can't ask for anything more, after all.

(it's enough to have happiness, if only for a moment)

* * *

They stop by Karin's place later, and first it's awkward as they stand together in the room and all sort of realize the absurd sort of love triangle where everyone tried to off each other that they were in. But it's the only friendly location for miles around and they need a place to stay that isn't outside since Sakura is heavily pregnant now, tottering down the road like she's carrying a watermelon made of lead, and all of a sudden Sakura is going into labour and she's heaving and crying out and that just kills the mood like nothing else.

Then it turns out that Karin is the only one in the room who really knows what to do, because as proficient and experienced Sakura is in medicine, there's only so much direction you can give when you resemble a dying beached whale, and considering Sasuke's utter lack of experience with females, unless you counted Orochimaru in the body of a girl as he was occasionally prone to be, (you never knew with crazy snake paedophiles- you just never knew), Karin is the one who steps up to help and soon things are going smoothly and it's over and congratulations they are now officially parents to this pink and wrinkled and screaming _thing_ which at that moment looks like the most beautiful person in the room because who knew pregnancy would be so annoying and is Sakura glad that's over and just like that they're all laughing in crazed relief.

Sakura is the one who ends up suggesting Karin as godmother to the newly named Sarada.

(there are some things you can't go through with someone without becoming closer; giving birth is one of them.)

It is, in Sakura's opinion, a much better resolution than subtly trying to apologize to Karin for killing each other but also not killing each other and also liking the same guy but also trying to kill said guy who guess what ends up being Sakura's husband or partner or lover or whatever Sasuke is and yeah, she likes this solution a lot more.

Sasuke, for his part, is mostly relieved that Sakura is no longer screaming or clutching his hand in a death grip. The bones have literally shattered in Sakura's fist.

Yet he's nervous too; proud and happy and elated but also nervous.

He's scared of forcing his child on a path too soon, but also of not being there for her. And that's a fear he doesn't think will vanish any time soon.

It's why he's apprehensive, sometimes, of coming home. Of wondering if he will be welcomed. It's why he sometimes returns in the dark of night, when only Sakura is awake. He loves his daughter, yes, always, but he still fears her rejection.

His biggest fear was once disappointment. Of letting down his parents and clan, in tarnishing the red and white fan carefully stitched on all of his clothes.

(this is his biggest regret.)

He still fears the same thing. That his daughter, like her mother in so many ways, but sometimes as stubborn and lonely as he once was (he doesn't miss the pointed looks Sakura gives him on rare visits home. His daughter is as starved for a father's love as he once was, and that tears him apart in a way he can't describe), will one day not recognize him. That she will grow up, without him, and always be waiting for him to return.

Once he could not walk through the compound without being transported to the past, the eerie feeling of silence conjuring its own demons. The corner where his uncle handed out candy and a gentle smile to the kids running to school. The pitter-patter of tiny feet stringing along a wayward kite, its tassels swooping in the wind. The porch where the old lady had sat, a mug of tea wrapped in her wrinkled hands and the steam curling in lazy swirls.

Now, he feels as if he is returning home once more. A different place and time, but home.

Home is not the place you return to, he thinks, or the people that once lived there. They have their own homes elsewhere, stray ghosts drifting across cobbled paths and marked in rows of stone. Home is the people that you choose to go to; for him a black-haired girl with her mother's delicate face and unyielding tenacity, and a pink-haired woman who no longer needs to wait for him.

* * *

Sometimes he is forced to steal away in the midst of the night, only able to return home for a few hours. He keeps an image in his mind, though, of amber light permeating a small room, a woman sprawled out on the patchwork couch, head lolled back and eyes flickering shut as she lazily grins at him. Then turns to press his lips on the slumbering forehead of his daughter, her eyes fluttering amidst sleep before he leaves once more.

He shoves his fears under a blanket of their love. They are his demons to bear.

* * *

Clutching a toddling Sarada's hand, Sakura stands on the school field, looking out at the rows of faces before her. People will talk. They always have. It's not a fairytale, but maybe it's better that way. When there's space for questions and answers, subtle pushes and pulls that tug at each other like leaves tumbling against each other in the wind.

It is her story, after all. They are her choices to bear.

* * *

Their reputations will often precede them; even in civilian villages untouched by war. Sakura is the pink medic, glowing hands straight out of legends and storybooks, while Sasuke, they find, is the harbinger of death. He is not so often recognized, until his eyes bleed scarlet one night and he sees a small child sprint away from him. This is his curse, he thinks, retribution served on a platter before him. It is what Naruto has had to endure for years in the village; at least Sasuke can hide behind a god-like prowess and his friends, who through everything, have stuck fast to him.

Yet they will not be defined by their names, footsteps imprinted in sand before them as the waves wash them away to leave new ones in their wake.

 _If we were  
(but we weren't)  
We are so much more_

* * *

 **A/N: Guess who's actually writing stuff again? (for now) Hope you guys enjoyed- this is pretty much how I procrastinate in life so...yeah... I experimented with a couple different styles in here (there's a whole bunch of outtakes I have yet to write and maybe never will who knows); hope it worked out well! now go eat waffles :D ~Candy888**


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